Suffering

Suffering fastens upon our real being firmly and tenaciously; it cuts through all the appearances behind which we hide, until it reaches the depths where the living self dwells, into the darkness of which the latter retreats, trying to make good its escape...

But just because suffering can only touch our finite being, it comes as  revelation to us of the reality of our individual and separate existence.  We discover what we are the moment the world fails us, and what remains of ourselves when everything else is taken away.  When the world is against us, we see, starkly, the tragic quality of our personal destiny...  The ultimate distress is spiritual; it is born of the spectacle of the will to evil which runs riot through the world, even though we are not always its target, and which lurks no less at the bottom of our own hearts, forcing all creatures to feed their sense of power on the suffering of others, and realizing thus a sort of hateful solidarity between them...

In suffering we cling to being more tightly than ever, since every nerve that has not been broken is sensitized to the maximum...  It is certainly wrong to consider suffering as the worst of all evils, and to make its eradication our supreme goal.  It makes us aware of evil; it is not an evil in itself...

We may be sure that the value of every individual is in proportion to the extent, the subtlety, and the depth of the sufferings of which he is capable, for it is in suffering which gives him the most intimate communication with the world, and with himself.  The extent, the subtlety, and the depth of all the joys he can ever know are in proportion to them.  Who would renounce the joy in order to escape the suffering, and desire insensibility in their place?

It is suffering that deepens our consciousness, plowing it up, making it understanding and loving, scooping out a refuge in our souls into which the world may be welcomed.  It refines to an extreme delicacy our every contact with the world...

Since suffering penetrates to the secret of his most intimate life in the soul of a man, it awakens all the forces of self-love within him...  The real problem is not to find a way to anesthetize suffering, since that could only be done at the expense of the total sensibility, in other words, of consciousness itself.  The problem is how to transfigure it.  And is all the suffering in the world offered us no better alternative than revolt of resignation, one might well despair of the value of the world.  For suffering acquires meaning only when it nourishes the flame of our spiritual life.

My suffering is mine; it is not me.  If the self gives way before it and becomes one with it, it succumbs.  But there is another possibility - to remain detached from it without ceasing to feel it, and in so doing, to possess it.  In this tension, the individual within us is at once present and transcended.  Suffering becomes a sort of cauterization, which burns up the individual part of my nature, and forces me to consent to its annihilation.  

-Louis Lavelle

Louis Lavelle, 1951, was a professor at the Sorbonne, Paris, and was a prominent Christian philosopher.